The Wardman Wire

This was an event at the Senedd in Cardiff Bay. Attendance was about 40-45 including a number of AMs (Assembly Members) and visiting bloggers.

These are some nuggets and themes. I’ll link to anyone else who posts about the meeting (drop a note in the comments).

Bethan Jenkins has some short introductions from the speakers, including this one by Eleanor Burnham (one of the AMs for North Wales). It is a gem, and caused everyone nearby to gently and unobtrusively lean away slightly. It also explains why I don’t publish many photographs.

Bloggers as pamphleteers. An interesting comparison drawn in the conversation leading up to the event was between “bloggers” and “pamphleteers”. Pamphleteers have been at once at the leading (bleeding?) edge of “bottom-up” politics in the UK for centuries (Swift and “Eat Babies”, Corn Law Reform, Chartists, anti-Slavery, and Extending the Franchise – among others, and woodcuts and arguable the Wycliffe Bible in English before that). This form of publication has been both campaigning and scurrilous, but it is a good tradition to work within.

More sophistication in reading blogs. “Bloggers” is used to group a lot of people and websites together who are actually doing very different things. We need to distinguish between (to take 2 extremes) an analytical blog by a subject specialist, and a political gossip blog. We can distinguish between the Daily Star and the Financial Times, and between Jon Gaunt and Hamish McCrea when we are reading the newspapers; we should do the same for blogs.

Keeping up with what blogs are saying. There is not perfect transparency in the blogosphere – it is a dense network. Achievements by bloggers can go unnoticed, which feeds into criticism that blogs are “sound and fury signifying nothing”. I have a list of examples that I’ll post (probably tomorrow).

“No balloons in here, guv’nor”. The Senedd still has a ban in place for balloons: I took one along as a prop, and I had to leave it in the care of the excellent balloon-sitting service operated by the (extremely polite and helpful) security staff at the door. I have to admit I abandoned my yellow balloon rather than taking it to the pub afterwards.

Does anyone know, do the Holyrood, Stormont and Westminster Parliament’s ban balloons?

Value for Money? Peter Black AM was asked whether his blogging time was “good value for money”. I hope that Peter (and others) will give more insight into this area.

Integrity of Process is important. One question was how much blogs are subject to libel and other laws. The answer is that – as small publishers – we are subject to precisely the same laws as everyone else. That is also why I think that blog-specific regulation would be a bad mistake.

There is sufficient leeway in copyright and other law for sufficient use to be done legally, and now there are ample resources of free to use photographs for illustration.

I’m probably asking for trouble, and someone will point out dozens of errors on my own site: I work quite hard at getting it roughly right. Honest.

Resources in Political Blogging. As things stand, while anyone can write a diary style political blog – larger blogs seeking to make a broader impact cannot easily be self-supporting. I can see a role for larger political blogs at a City or Region level, or to provide independent political scrutiny, which would be a valuable complement to media coverage. As things stand, that opportunity depends on the writers being able to support their sites off their own backs.

Politicians’ Daily Lives. Is it valuable to read about the day by day doings of politicians?

Anonymous blogging is a continuing topic of conversation. This is deserving of a separate article. Anonymous comments – and blogs – can be used for political manipulation easily, but can also make comment possible from those who would suffer if they were identified. On the other hand, the most fundamental feature of a democratic society – the secret ballot – depends on exactly the same point.

Independent blogs versus media blogs. Which ones are more trustworthy? Some give BBC and media blogs are a higher reputation.

It comes back to a word that is unpopular: Brand (i.e., reputation). Bloggers have to build up their own brand, just as the Observer, the BBC and the Press Gazette have, and that takes time.

My view is that independent blogs can focus on areas that the national media can’t spare time to cover (no one else will do that), and can also do certain types of coverage should make a point of not riding on the back of the media. Examples of types of coverage well-suited to blogs are long term campaigning on an issue, scrutinising the media itself and allowing “ordinary people” to publish themselves without an intermediary.

Blogging in silos. Politicians live a lot of time in the political-media “bubble”. Political bloggers blog in the political silo. Blogs are supposed to facilitate participation: that probably means that some political blogs need to become more eclectic.

Simple things that can make blogging easier, but are not known to most political bloggers. One point made was “I don’t know who’s reading my blog”. There are free services available to solve many of these common difficulties, but they are not known to political bloggers. Is there a need for a project to explain the “Nuts and Bolts of Political Blogging“?

For a start, one free service for tracking your visitors is from Quantcast.com. Use the “quantised” version and it will tell you which organisations are visiting your website – translated from the IP Address. This service requires a Javascript snippet in each page, which means it won’t work with wordpress.com blog, but will work with blogger.com blogs.

And an acknowledgement/disclosure to Positif Politics for kindly supplying my railway ticket and a hotel for the night. I paid for the beer.

Responses

• Bethan Jenkins has a Live Blog and some videos.
• Dianne Selden has some quotes but thinks the ground covered was not new enough.
• The Bevan Foundation have some comments, and have made some changes to their blog layout.
• Valleys Mam may have been there.
• Peter Black has nothing yet, so I assume he is (platonically) helping a certain colleague with her email while writing his article.
  [Update: Peter Black’s computer is choking on a huge video file. If it’s just the speakers it will be half an hour or so, which will be something like 10Gb. If it is the whole thing, Cor Blimey Lovaduck Gawd ‘Elp Us.
• Betsan Powys says “we won it“, but then counting scores is one of her specialities.